Do you want sprouts with that?

When Lyfe's consultant, Campbell,
mentions the target scale, Earthbound's senior manager for national
food service, Jon Kiley, screws up his face in a frown. Lyfe's menu
features a fair share of beets, cabbage and potatoes, not to
mention boatloads of those Brussels sprouts. As Kiley points out,
organic root vegetables are a lot tougher to supply than organic
frisée, kale and rocket. Since they take a long time to grow,
they're more susceptible to insects and consequently more difficult
to deliver as organic (no chemical pesticides allowed) -- which may
create a problem when it comes to Lyfe's future demand for organic
potatoes and sweet potato fries. Also, expanding production is hard
under the current rules for organic produce: it takes three years
just to certify a field as organic, and five to seven years before
the soil becomes truly productive. "It may be viable," Kiley says,
"if you have 50 stores." But 20 times that? The
question hangs in the air unanswered.

Also left unmentioned is the problem
of seasonality. As of now, no one at Lyfe claims that 100 per cent
of ingredients can be obtained from organic sources year-round.
"The answer has always been no, it cannot be done," Campbell says.
No matter how energy-efficient the kitchen, no matter how
technically astute the procurement practices -- weather happens.
Too much rain rots tomatoes. Oranges freeze.Texas onions shrivel in a drought.

None of this troubles Mike Roberts,
though. Lyfe sees Whole
Foods as a model for how responsible food consumption can shift
the marketplace. "We're really, really early," Roberts says. "There
are 80 million people who have become much more aware of the food
theyeat. And that's going to
continue."

Perhaps he's right to be sanguine.
After all, even as McDonald's metastasised across America during
the 60s, US farmers weren't prepared to supply it and its
competitors at the staggering scale that they reached during the
70s. The rise of fast food transformed the entire world
agricultural system, in many ways for the worse. If a
sustainable-food chain could achieve even a fraction of McDonald's
growth today, then the whole system might shift again, this time
for the better. Such, at least, is Roberts's vision. "I believe,
without being religious, that this is a cause," he says. "'Take
this bread, take this wine,'" he goes on, his dark eyes aglow with
the fervour of the priest he never became. "It's the quintessential
element of faith."

Frederick Kaufman is a
contributing editor at Harper's. His book, Bet theFarm (Wiley), is out on October 17